Mounting VMFS on a snapshot LUN
Some environments maintain copies of the production LUNs as a backup, by replicating them. These replicas are exact copies of the LUNs that are already presented to the ESXi hosts. If, for any reason, a replicated LUN is presented to an ESXi host, then the host will not mount the VMFS volume on the LUN. This is a precaution to prevent data corruption.
Note
You can however force-mount such a volume. But you need to make sure that the original LUN is unpresented.
How to do it...
The act of mounting a snapshot volume can be done in two ways:
Using the vSphere Web Client's New Datastore wizard
Using esxcli
Using the New Datastore wizard
The following procedure will guide you through the steps required to mount a VMFS volume on a replica LUN or a LUN detected as snapshot:
Use the vSphere Web Client to connect to the vCenter Server.
Navigate to Home | Storage.
With the Datacenter object selected, navigate to Related Objects | Datastores and click on the New Datastore icon...
